o earn an A for this exam you will need to go beyond meeting the minimum submission asked in the question, demonstrating critical thinking skills.  A well-written answer will probably be at least 350 words for most of the questions.

1.) Name a specific company, or organization that you are interested in, and identify 3 specific strategies that they should consider to improve their operational performance.  In your answer discuss the obstacles to their achieving these operational improvements, and what they should do to overcome these obstacles. (Note operational challenges – not sales and marketing)

2.) What are the inputs and outputs of the Master scheduling process? Why is this process important?  What are 3 obstacles to developing an accurate Master Schedule?

What is a strategy for overcoming each of these three obstacles? (3 x 1).  How does an inaccurate master schedule potentially impact manufacturing cost? 

4.) Identify 3 strategies for dealing with uneven demand.  Then identify 3 strategies for successfully dealing with a demand that increases suddenly and unexpectedly?  How does responding to uneven demand relate to product quality?

5.) Name all of the functions of inventory from your textbook.  How are these functions affected by lead time, specifically whether lead times are very long, or relatively short? How does an increase, or decrease in lead time affect inventory carrying cost?

6.) Identify a project that you are interested in other than the fundraiser or job search we worked on in class.  Identify the major steps of this project, and which of these are on the critical path.  Then show the last step of the project and estimate the total time for the project. 

NOTE: Estimating the total project time will require developing a general understanding of what needs to be done between the first steps and the last step, how much time each step takes and how much overlap occurs from one step to another.

7.) If you were an operations manager for an organization (service or manufacturing) with at least 1,000 employees what three strategies would you use to make the operation as successful as possible?  What is your rationale for each of the three strategies?  What is one thing that might go wrong with each of these three strategies?  Approach this question by first identifying a specific business or type of business.  (Note that if you are managing 1000 employees there will be a number of levels between you and the lower level employees.  This is an operations question – so the response is related to operational challenges – not sales, marketing, finance, or accounting.